I was tear gassed by the government for the first time in July 2020 at one of the many Black Lives Matter protests that broke out all over the country. The feeling is excruciating, like your lungs are trying to kill you from the inside out. The sting in your eyes is painful, too. But oddly, after you’ve been tear gassed enough times, you mostly just resent the inconvenience of having to stand around and involuntarily gasp and sob. That summer, I learned the art of walking out of a cloud of tear gas — briskly, but not too briskly, lest you lose breath control and take in a huge huff of aerosolized pain.
I thought about this five years later, as I watched Trump Attorney General Pam Bondi appear on Fox News after Customs and Border Protection agents killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. “How did these people go out and get gas masks?” she asked, incredulously. “These protesters — would you know how to walk out on the street and buy a gas mask, right now? Think about that.”
As a longtime gas mask user, I can sympathize. There isn’t a lot of reliable information out there about how to buy a gas mask, especially for the specific purpose of living under state repression. But hopefully after reading this guide you’ll feel equipped to make an educated decision.
The first time I went out into the Portland protests, I walked into a cloud of pepper spray and ended up crying and coughing while doubled over on a nearby sidewalk. So I bought some goggles. The next time, I was tear gassed. I bought better goggles and a half-face respirator. About a week later, I owned a full-face gas mask; one ex-military friend remarked that the gas mask looked more hardcore than the ones that the US Army handed out to joes. This was just silly, since the mask I had bought was technically a full-face respirator, rather than a proper military-grade mask, but I had to admit that my new equipment looked very extreme.
Dozens of my fellow journalists were already on the ground by the time I got there; as the feds escalated in force, we all upgraded our equipment bit by bit. The mask I got was pretty good. I practiced taking it out of my bag and pulling it over my head, anticipating the moment I heard the telltale hiss of a gas canister; I learned how to tighten and adjust the straps while on the move. With the mask on, I could stand in the thick pea-soupers of brownish tear gas that the feds were so fond of, and pull out my phone and start tapping out my reporting notes.
When I eventually sat down to write my article about the Portland protests, I had a strange kind of epiphany, if it can even be called that. Out in the real world, when drowning in tear gas and adrenaline, I only thought of the feds as an antagonistic, occupying force; later, in the confines of my home office, I found myself considering their perspective. But rather than adding nuance and clarity to the fucked-up warzone less than a mile from my apartment, I was more confused than ever.
The Verge consulted journalists who covered the Portland protests in 2020, where federal and local forces regularly used tear gas against protesters over the course of four months.
It’s important for a gas mask to slide over your head quickly, even in a chaotic environment.
You may be wearing a gas mask for just a few minutes, or you may find yourself in the mask for several hours at a time. After testing against both federal and local law enforcement, we found that although a half-face respirator and goggles are better than nothing, they are not an adequate substitute for full-face coverage.
A quality gas mask should last through normal wear and tear, like getting beaten or thrown around by the police. The materials of a gas mask are especially important if a federal agent grabs you by your hair.
The best gas masks run close to $400, which is not a price point that everyone can afford. Not everyone can shell out for the gold standard in gas masks, but fortunately there are still decent options for around $120.
Why did tear gas even exist? I wondered later, as I sat at my laptop to write my piece. As far as I could tell, all it did was make people angrier. If it neither killed nor neutralized, and merely hurt and enraged people, for what situation could it ever be appropriate? Why was it being used at all?
I struggled, too, with vocabulary. I was at my computer, trying to point to concrete proof to explain that the protests were protests rather than riots, but I found myself baffled as to what the hallmarks of a riot even were. I had thought that a crowd being tear gassed in the dead of night might be similar to a mosh pit at a concert, but riddled with fear instead of elation — a crowd pushing and shoving, overcome with heightened emotion. But I found that the people around me, even when they were screaming and throwing eggs and other produce at the feds, would apologize if they even slightly jostled me. I did worry about being trampled one time, while standing next to an underprepared television crew that had come without gas masks and kept panicking throughout the night. When did a gathering turn into a riot? Were riots even real?
I started polling my friends on whether they’d ever witnessed something they could describe indisputably as a riot. Everyone I knew had only ever seen clashes with the police that were disputed as protests, riots, or uprisings. There was only one outlier: a friend of a friend, a European who had once been caught up in a soccer riot. Tear gas had been deployed, and instead of exacerbating things, the tear gas had worked. The two supporters’ clubs had disengaged and dispersed.
This revelation had me reeling. I had spent my entire adult life thinking that riot cops existed to fight protesters, and although I had long been critical of police brutality, for some reason, I had come to accept that there were two sides to a conflict and that the police would be one of those sides. I had forgotten that there could ever be domestic conflicts where law enforcement were not themselves belligerents.
I kept the gas mask long after I had filed my draft and the piece had run. It still got some use now and then, but as the protests petered out, I eventually put the gas mask on my bookshelf as a memento of a surreal era, and as a reminder that fascism lurked just beneath the surface of American civic life.
The longer I wear the gas mask, the more the rubber seal presses against my skin. When it’s tight, it’s uncomfortable; when it’s loose, it slowly drags down and chafes the skin. I hate that you have to lean in real close in order to talk to people; I hate the vague sensation of being trapped inside a fishbowl. I also strongly suspect that the mask is not adequate protection against the particulates in tear gas from a health standpoint — I didn’t have a normal period for six months after the 2020 protests.
But even if the mask wasn’t handling all of the particulates, I was pain-free while wearing the mask, and that was the most important part in a chaotic, low-visibility situation where I had a job to do. My body still remembers what it feels like to get tear gassed, and even the sight of a deployed smoke grenade will make me tense up. I have never coughed, cried, or thrown up while wearing the gas mask. In 2025, I took the gas mask off my shelf. It now resides in my reporting bag. Its presence there is reassuring; I know I can do my work even when trapped in a chemical haze.
For a while, it felt like the world had forgotten about what happened in Portland in 2020, that this cataclysmic event over the course of four months that left so many of my peers battered both physically and emotionally had been memory-holed for being too heavy to grapple with. But as the feds surged into Minnesota, orchestrating an invasion bigger by several orders of magnitude, I realized that the past was not dead and buried. I could see the legacy of 2020 in photos from Minneapolis — the unmarked vans, the ICE agents dressed like right-wing militias, the protesters in gas masks and helmets. Even phone calls from other reporters asking what kind of gear I owned was a reminder that nothing is truly in vain.
The 2020 federal invasion of Portland ended with DHS withdrawing from the city — not because the protesters breached the walls or killed the feds or captured the castle, but because the protests simply refused to subside.
No matter how much tear gas the feds flooded into downtown, the crowds got bigger, not smaller. When the news of the van abductions spread, the protests swelled with people who looked like they belonged at an HOA meeting, rather than shoulder-to-shoulder with black bloc anarchists. Eventually, thousands would throng the park blocks in front of the downtown federal courthouse.
This was not a case of fans of rival football clubs getting too drunk and rowdy and then coming to their senses after a little jolt of weaponized capsaicin. Portland donned its gas mask and stood its ground.
As we’ve learned in the last year, Portland is far from unique. Cities across America have shown resilience and courage in the face of sudden abductions, unmarked vans, and masked agents. We do not have time to heave, cough, or weep — so we pull on our gas masks and walk forward into the mist.
What is tear gas for? It is for inciting riots. How did people go out and get gas masks? They ordered them online, because they do not want to riot.
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